I think I prefer my IMF when it is rude, impertinent and spectacularly wrong, as it was a little more than a year ago, when chief economist Olivier Blanchard said that George Osborne was playing with fire by continuing with his austerity programme.

Ever since, it has had to eat humble pie. As it has turned out, the UK is now Europe’s star performer. Conditions in the beleaguered eurozone would be even worse were it not for Britain’s renewed love affair with consumption, sucking in all those BMWs, fine wines and seasonal fruits from the low-spending Continent. Professor Blanchard has much to thank the Chancellor for.

Yet at least back then he was making a perfectly valid point about lack of investment spending in the UK — one which, by the way, remains very pertinent. In any case, the IMF has now reverted to form in providing the usual, anodyne statement of the bleedin’ obvious about the state of the UK economy — including, almost unbelievably, a pat on the back for the Chancellor for the brilliance of his “Help-to-Buy” scheme.

I bumped into Professor Blanchard as he was leaving the IMF headquarters after its spring meeting in April. “How was the meeting,” I asked. “Fine,” he replied, “apart from the British press,” which he implied, rightly as it happens, had got it in for him. “What is it about your British press,” he asked. “It’s only politics,” I said, before explaining that he had not only been proved wrong about the recovery, but that his remarks had been seized upon by the Opposition as validation of its criticism of UK economic policy. “Ah politics,” he said, “But I’m an economist.” Quite so.

In any case, it’s worth noting that the Article IV repeats the wisdom of the moment — that interest rates should remain on hold and any excesses in the housing market should, as a first line of attack, be dealt with through the use of “macro-prudential” tools, or credit regulation by another name.

Wrong. De-regulate supply, by all means, but don’t regulate credit except by its price. As Jeremy Stein, a Federal Reserve Board Governor, has noted, monetary policy may be a blunt tool for tackling financial risks, but it does have the merit of “getting in all the cracks”.

Why I feel sorry for Tesco's chief executive

You should never feel sorry for the beleaguered chief executive. Whatever stress and misery he’s experiencing, he’ll be handsomely rewarded for it, and, barring demonstrable negligence or fraud, he’ll eventually receive a bumper pay-off in token recognition of his failure to steady the ship, before moving on to fail again in highly remunerated fashion somewhere else.

Nonetheless, I do find myself somewhat sympathetic to the luckless Philip Clarke, chief executive of Tesco. He’s just announced that first-quarter trading at Britain’s biggest retailer is the worst he’s seen in a four-decade career, and warned that things are unlikely to improve any time soon. Meanwhile, Wm Morrison is accused by its now retired founder, Sir Ken Morrison, of a strategy that produces more “bulls***” than his own herd of cattle. The chairman, Sir Ian Gibson, seems to have got the message; he’ll be standing down as soon as a successor is found.

We’ve known for a long time now that there is something very badly wrong in supermarket land; with the march of the discounters, the squeeze in living standards, and the parallel rise of online and convenience shopping, the market has changed, and the industry leaders have failed to keep up.

Yet this was, in a sense, always going to be the case, for it is in the nature of business that the very things that make big companies successful will eventually turn round and bite them. With Tesco, it was the rise of the out-of-town megastore. For years, Tesco’s ability to capture these sites powered the group to ever greater heights. At its peak, Tesco had more than 30pc of the UK groceries market, an almost impossibly high number from which the only way forward is down.

It is the unfortunate lot of Mr Clarke to preside over this relative decline. But, though there are undoubtedly things he could have done better, he cannot in truth be seen as its architect. The die was cast long before he became chief executive.

Again, I don’t particularly want to defend Mr Clarke, but the demands put on today’s FTSE 100 bosses are becoming virtually impossible to reconcile . First there are shareholders to answer to, but anyone who thinks they speak with one voice is living in a bygone age.

Big companies these days are controlled not by the underlying owners of their capital, but by professional fund managers with often very divergent priorities, both among themselves and those whose money they manage. Some want income and capital realisation, others want long-term capital appreciation, others want no more than a fast buck, whatever the long-term costs, and still others don’t care about the underlying business at all; they are fleeting, high-velocity traders, there one second, gone the next. All this has led to what Lord Myners, the former Treasury minister, has termed “the ownerless corporation” – a state of affairs in which complacency and mistakes in both management and governance are almost inevitable.

Then there are the other “stakeholders” to look after – customers, suppliers, employees, the environment, the community, the “national interest”, and so on. Mr Clarke is under pressure to boost both margins and sales, but if he attempts to do this at the expense of his suppliers and employees he’ll soon find himself under a very different form of pressure. Labour has called for company bosses to return to the paternalistic principles that governed the founding fathers of Cadbury . However unrealistic such demands, they touch a nerve, and the modern chief executive must in some way respond.

So I don’t particularly blame Mr Clarke for Tesco’s predicament. Sir Terry Leahy, his predecessor, was always going to be a hard act to follow, not just because he was a tireless and brilliant chief executive but also – how to put this delicately? – because all outstanding business success stories are in a sense set up to fail.

Things are rarely as good at the top of the cycle as claimed. In some way or other, underlying problems and challenges will have been glossed over. Sir Terry was lucky enough to get out at the top. For the hapless Mr Clarke, it’s all too likely to be an exit at the bottom.